History – Metaversinghttps://metaversing.com
Taking the Metaverse from Science Fiction to Reality
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Experiencing Presence in a Text-Based Virtual Worldhttps://metaversing.com/2015/06/08/experiencing-presence-in-a-text-based-virtual-world/
https://metaversing.com/2015/06/08/experiencing-presence-in-a-text-based-virtual-world/#commentsMon, 08 Jun 2015 18:50:05 +0000http://metaversing.com/?p=3774I’ve been invited to participate in an online panel on MUDs, MMORPGs, and the Metaverse which includes Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University. He was heavily involved with the early MUDs and virtual world scene, and has written both papers and books about virtual worlds and their economies.

The DikuMUD Family Tree

As part of my pre-panel research, I brushed up on my own involvement with MUDs during the 1990s. Much of my time was spend in the DikuMUD family tree, and mostly with ROM, the Rivers of Mud variant.

In the early 1990s, it was easy to sum up the MUD experience in just a sentence. You could say, “It is just like Zork, except, multiplayer” and most technical types would nod their head in quiet appreciation. Today, it is much more complicated to explain only because text-based games are unfamiliar to most people.

Elemental Gateway
To the west a path dips and winds among some flowing
firepits. To the northeast a path goes toward the
river. Beyond toward the northeast and northwest are
outcrops which rise up from the canyon floor. To the
east there is a cave mouth which leads into the canyon
wall. And to the south the path leads up, away, and
out of the canyon.
Various pure and cross-breeds of elemental forms
wander the canyon floor, which extends in a wide
swath northwards.
A girth made of magical ice has been left here.
A small elemental approaches from the east.
(Source: Rivers of Mud, Canyon Zone)

A typical MUD was an internet based server that you log into with a text based terminal. The entire world and the actions therein are described in nothing but words on the screen, followed by a prompt for your action. Wait too long, and the world moves on without you.

There were many variants of MUDs. Some were purely social, and some roleplaying. There were a few that focused on player-vs-player combat. Far and above, the most popular type of MUD was the traditional hack-and-slash environment.

In the hack-and-slash variant, environments are populated with appropriately themed mobs (mobile monsters), which when slain, yield experience and perhaps gold for your effort. Slain monsters can also offer equipment or items which will help your character or advance a particular quest.

As you gain better equipment, you are able to take on more powerful foes. As you gain experience, your character levels up and becomes stronger. Reach a high enough level and you may taste some of the many powers held by the Implementers, the lofty rulers of the virtual world.

What made MUDs different from a PC-based text adventure like Zork is that you shared your experience with other players. They, like you, logged in from around the globe to play the game. A popular MUD could have over one hundred players logged in at the same time, playing in the same virtual world.

It was the single player hack-and-slash player-vs-environment gameplay that drew many of us in. Once inside, we found that we had a lot to gain from working together. As we teamed up to slay countless foes, we realized that we had a lot in common with each other. At first, we’d talk about the game, but then we’d move on to real-world conversations. MUDs became a social environment.

Over the years, the in-world communication between players continued to develop and improve (including in-game actions known as emotes). Social hierarchies were coded into forms such as guilds. Special environments were created for group events and hangouts. For us, the experience was just as rich as any social VR application today. Perhaps even more so. We all shared the common experience of an engaging and interactive virtual world.

While investigating some topics for my upcoming panel, I came across a research paper on presence. It suggested that multiple factors, including the vividness of the environment, the level of interactivity, and the degree to which users influence the environment… they all contributed to the degree of presence felt by the participants.

Many of us are familiar with presence as it relates to virtual reality, but what many may find curious was that paper wasn’t even considering 3D computer graphics, directional sound, or head mounted displays. It focused on MUDs. Their finding? People were experiencing presence with others in a text-based virtual world. You can read it here.

That’s something to consider as we talk about presence and creating social experiences in VR. If we are able to achieve presence with nothing more than words scrolling across a screen, perhaps we have something more to learn from the MUDs of the 1990s.

If you’d like to attend our upcoming panel on MUDs, MMORPGs, and the Metaverse, a head mounted display is not required. You can join us in the Convrge online theater this Monday June 8th, 2015 at 9pm eastern.

]]>https://metaversing.com/2015/06/08/experiencing-presence-in-a-text-based-virtual-world/feed/2jmccormThe DikuMUD Family TreeBook Review: Designing Virtual Worldshttps://metaversing.com/2015/06/07/book-review-designing-virtual-worlds/
https://metaversing.com/2015/06/07/book-review-designing-virtual-worlds/#commentsSun, 07 Jun 2015 23:23:06 +0000http://metaversing.com/?p=4061It has been over a year since my last review of a vintage virtual reality book. I’ve recently come across a good one that I’d like to share.

In 1978, Richard Bartle co-authored MUD, the very first virtual world. In 2003, he shared his twenty-five years of virtual world and MMORPG experience in the book Designing Virtual Worlds. Here are some excerpts from the preface:

Too much virtual world design is derivative. Designers take one or more existing systems as foundations on which to build, sparing little thought as to why these earlier worlds were constructed the way they were.

Are designers even aware that there are decisions they can unmake? Although a good deal of design is evolutionary, that does not mean designers can’t be revolutionary, too.

The key is in recognizing the face that what seems eminently logical to you from your usual perspective might turn out to be disastrous when viewed from another angle — and then realizing that the worlds you’re drawing inspiration from almost certainly contain elements designed by people who didn’t recognize that fact until it was too late.

Obviously, the preface resonated with me on the topic of metaverse design.

The book is an incredible seven hundred and fourty-one pages, filled with decades of experiences and observations in virtual worlds. According to Wikipedia, it has been called “the bible of MMORPG design”.

Designing Virtual Worlds at Amazon

The book is not a step-by-step guide to implementing multiplayer virtual worlds. It was published in 2003, so it doesn’t have significant comments to make directly on the topic of virtual reality or more recent MMORPG design elements. But that isn’t why you want the book.

You want the book to open your eyes to new possibilities as much as you want it to help you to question you own design choices. He covers a very wide range of topics from server architecture, player motivations, character attributes, ethics, and so much more. He introduces a topic, explains what has and hasn’t worked, and makes a few comments and suggestions of his own.

The only real controversy in the book seems to be in his observations into gamer psychology. This is based on his 1996 paperHearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs. He proposes four major categories of players: Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers.

I made much more sense of the Killer category as those looking for dominance over others. A combination of competitive players (the kind that would enjoy DOTA 2), griefers, and in-world politicians. I think that the label of “Killer” is what leads readers down the wrong path, not necessarily the thoughts behind it.

Player Interest Graph

So you can see how his four categories fit on the horizontal axis of Players vs World, and the vertical axis of Acting vs Interacting. In understanding what Bartle is trying to say, I think it makes more sense to put a different label on the vertical axis. Instead of Acting versus Interacting, it should be Dominating versus Exploring.

When I shared this observation with Richard, he agreed that the “Killers” quadrant is badly understood and badly named (inherited from a late 1980s perspective). He originally called the vertical axis active/passive, but that didn’t really capture what he wanted. It also had problems during peer review (active is not on the same dimension as passive, just as dominating is not on the same dimension as exploring).

While dominating/exploring may help us better understand what is going on in a two-dimensional player graph, it turns out that it doesn’t fit into the larger picture. Why?

Bartle had developed a third axis to distinguish between explicit and implicit actions. A player with a social interest could be intentionally networking with other people, or just casually making friends. (Our own friends who are developing social VR experiences should take notice.)

His view is that “I wouldn’t say all socialisers were exploring other people anyway; on the 8-types graph, the networker-socialisers would be but the friend-socialisers wouldn’t be.” That said, he thinks the labels aren’t quite capturing what is going on here. Perhaps after reading his book, you may be able to find a better set of labels.

If you are interested in seeing where you fit in to the 4-way classification, you can discover your own primary and secondary classification in the player interest graph via an online test. I’m primarily an achiever/explorer type.

I found it amazing that one of the most relevant titles in my vintage collection of virtual reality books ends up being the one that makes the least number of references to virtual reality itself. But as the author explains, we’re just inheriting and iterating on virtual world design decisions that have been made by others over the past thirty-seven years.

One last thing. Richard points us to his own early metaverse experiment.

Metaverse-wise, players could “seamlessly” walk from MUD to the second world I wrote, Valley (which used the MUD engine). I didn’t let them take anything with them, though, because it was too open for exploits in a game-oriented environment.

Maybe we’re just looking for a new way to implement a long-lost feature.

JUNE 8, 2015: Richard Bartle’s response has been integrated into the article.